Tire wear plays an important role in vehicle safety, reliability and performance. Tread wear, referring to the loss of tread material, directly affects such vehicle factors. Tread wear may be monitored and measured through placement of wear sensors in the tire tread. Reliability of the direct wear measurement of tire tread, however, can be problematic due to issues such as sensor failure, difficulty in sensor integration into a tire tread and difficulty in retrieval of sensor data over the lifetime of a tire tread.
It is accordingly desirable to achieve a system and method that accurately and reliably measures tire wear state and communicates wear state to vehicle operators and/or to vehicle operating systems such as braking and stability control systems.